Annual Reports | Berkeley Faculty Association

Annual Report for the Academic Year 2022-23

We hope this finds you well and enjoying the different rhythm of summertime. Thank you for your continued support of the Berkeley Faculty Association.

This year we celebrated the Berkeley Faculty Association’s fiftieth anniversary. It was created by faculty to preserve the independence of Senate and faculty governance, as well as to advocate for public support of the University of California in Sacramento. Over the past fifty years we have been the independent and progressive voice of faculty: protecting academic freedom and freedom of speech on our campus, defending our deteriorating salaries and benefits, and maintaining a vision of the public university that does not depend on student debt-financing or low-cost and precarious labor. In recent years we have strongly allied ourselves to the growing labor movement in US higher education and embraced a vision of a racially just, and ecologically sustainable, public university (see our statement on the University We Are For).

This year has been a busy one. Remember you can keep up to date with all of our activities, on our website, especially on the Viewpoints tab where we post our op-eds, and by following us on Twitter @FacultyBerkeley.

We have defended our library from continuing cuts and closures by sponsoring a resolution, unanimously approved by Senate in October, to restore funding to the levels promised by the administration in response to its own Commission on the Future of the Library a decade ago. Despite opposition from the Senate’s own Library Committee the library has continued to implement a space plan which includes the closing of three libraries. Faculty, students and alumni, including former Governor Jerry Brown, have also voiced their opposition to the closure of the Anthropology Library. The Chancellor has convened yet another committee to review library funding. We hope it will hear the voice of faculty and not over rule clear guidance it has from Senate.
As campuses across the country tighten restrictions on freedom of speech, and reduce protections around academic freedom, we wrote a detailed response to the draft report by a Joint Senate-Administration Workgroup on the Role of the University and its Units in Political Action which attracted a good deal of media attention. The final report has yet to be published.
We continue to monitor the development of new facilities by the university’s real estate office Capital Strategies. While we recognize the urgent problem of housing for all who work and study on our campus, especially as student enrollment grows at what we consider an unsustainable rate, we are concerned by some of the private-public partnerships used to build new facilities that often pushes up the rent burden of students and local populations. This set of issues continue to be most publicly visible around the development of People’s Park and the University of California’s deeply misguided investment in Blackstone.
In the Fall we stood alongside our graduate student colleagues as they went on strike to secure a livable wage and cure the University of its dependence on low cost labor – just as last years strike by lecturers did. In doing so, we also worked with our sister chapters around the University of California to provide support for faculty wishing to support the strike, especially around the issue of refusing to pick up the struck work of grading.
Finally, we continue to monitor all matters related to faculty welfare whether that concerns pay ‘rises’ that fail to match inflation rates and make UC faculty salaries lag behind our peer institutions, the woeful delays in merit and promotion cases on our campus which has created anxiety and hardship for many, or changes to our health benefits.

The year ended with some big changes for us as an organization. We renegotiated the dues we pay to the Council of UC Faculty Associations, the organization that coordinates efforts across campuses and lobbies in Sacramento on our behalf. This will provide us with more resources for local initiatives on the Berkeley campus. Some long-serving members of our Board stepped down. It is impossible to sufficiently thank Chris Rosen (Business School) for her decades of service, especially those years before 2009 when she almost single-handedly kept the organization going. For more than a decade Peter Glazer (TDPS) has been a tireless advocate for faculty and the public university, we will miss his energy and common sense. Last, but by no means least, Anne-Lise François (English) has ensured that the Board remained engaged with questions of policing and the continuing impact of the pandemic on many of our campus community.

The following Board members were reelected for a two-year term: Paul Fine (Integrative Biology), Amanda Goldstein (English), Cori Hayden (Anthropology), Alastair Iles (ESPM), Mara Loveman (Sociology), Poulomi Saha (English), James Vernon (History). While Shard Chari (Geography) and Celeste Langan (English) continue their appointed terms we are also delighted to announce that the Board also appointed new members to its ranks. Welcome Sai Balakrishnan (City and Urban Planning), Adam Benkato (Middle Eastern Studies), Natalia Brizuela (Spanish and Portugese), Zoe Hamstead (City and Urban Planning), Roshannak Khesti (TDPS) and Ula Taylor (African American Studies). We are always eager to recruit more faculty from STEM fields so do get in touch if you want are interested in working with us.

I am delighted to announce a new leadership team of Mara Loveman, Alastair Iles, Sharad Chari, and myself.

As always, we must close by thanking our extraordinary staff Eric Hayes and Deborah Rosenberg. The busier we are, the busier they are and there is certainly no way I would have survived this year without their labor and support.